War Notes: Right into the Weekend 📝

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NewsNation Chief Washington Anchor and On Balance host Leland Vittert was a foreign correspondent for four years in Jerusalem. He gives you an early look at tonight's 9 p.m. ET show, delivered straight to your inbox.

Editor's note 📝: Welcome to an abbreviated edition of "War Notes" – I am lamenting the end of summer. The long nights and cool breezes. Hope you get to spend the weekend with the people you love.

Only Right About 2 Things ✅

📰 During my morning reading today, I came across a column by Politico's Michael Schaffer: "Why Washington Residents Aren't Flooding the Streets to Protest Trump."

✍️ "D.C. is built for protests. But after Trump's takeover, they aren't happening," Schaffer writes.
- "How can there not be protests," Schaffer ponders as the American experiment hangs in the balance.
🚔 Duh, I thought – people who live in D.C. love that someone is dealing with the city's crime.
- 🤷‍♂️ They may not like National Guard soldiers all over the place, but they like being able to safely walk around more.
  - 📸 Check out this photo op at the Lincoln Memorial.
🪧 Schaffer blames the lack of street protests on angry folks getting heated on social media.
- HA 🤣: Only a true member of the Washington blob would not understand the lack of protests.
- Maybe, just maybe, people are happy the cops are there.
  - 🙄 This encapsulates the Democratic establishment's worldview.

All hat 🧢: At an Oval Office press conference today, President Trump wore a hat that said "Trump was right about everything" – Click here to see him wearing the hat.

Maybe, maybe not – nobody is right about everything.
Political truth ✅: As the American president, you don't have to be right about everything – just two things: Safety and the economy.
- Broadly speaking, Americans want to be safe and financially secure – do those two things, and a vast majority of the country will be happy.
Briefly ✅: Trump is doing well on both issues.
- The border is closed.
- He's showing leadership in addressing crime.
- The stock market is at a record high, and unemployment is low.
See below 📝: A detailed breakdown of where we stand on the two issues.
- There are dangers – Russia and high prices.
  - Plus the unknown unknowns that crop up for presidents.

Safety 🚔: President Trump campaigned on making America and its cities a safer place.

✈️One main aspect of making the country safer was through cracking down on illegal immigration.
- ⛓️ Trump has effectively closed the border.
  - Wow 😳: There have been over 125,000 border crossings so far in 2025, year to date.
    - 📊 Compare that to the 1.1 million crossings the Biden administration had at this time in 2024, year to date.
    - Very few of those who crossed were released into the country.
- ✈️ Deportation numbers are surging under Trump's lead.
  - 📰 "At least 180,000 people have been deported by ICE under Mr. Trump so far. At the current higher pace, the agency is on track to deport more than 400,000 people in his first year in office, well more than the 271,000 people ICE removed in the year ending last September," The New York Times reports.
🚨 Then, there are homegrown criminals, whom Trump is also cracking down on.
- His efforts to fight crime in big cities started with his federalization of law enforcement in Washington, D.C.
- How is that going? Just look at the headlines:
  - 📰 "630 arrests made in DC since federal takeover, AG Bondi says," Washington's ABC 7 headlines.
  - 📰 "Feds nab suspected MS-13 gangster, top 700 arrests in DC crackdown," writes Fox News.
  - 📰 "White House: Half of D.C. crackdown arrests are in high-crime areas," headlines Axios.
- Fact check ✅: D.C. is an objectively dangerous city – these statistics mean something.
🗽 Trump has said that D.C. is just the start of his crackdown on crime – other major cities can expect help from the federal government soon.
- 🎤 "We're going to make our cities very, very safe. Chicago is a mess … We'll straighten that one out, probably next. That will be our next one after this, and it won't even be tough," Trump told reporters earlier today.
More on crime 📺: Watch our segment from last night analyzing Trump's takeover of D.C.'s law enforcement.

Prosperity 💰: Here is when we look at whether Americans are able to afford their daily bills, plus what the larger economic state means for the near future.

📈 The stock market surged today to a record high after the Federal Reserve chair hinted at potentially cutting the interest rate.
- 📊 In the first hour after Powell's remarks, the Dow jumped nearly 900 points.
Warning ⚠️: As we've been telling you for weeks, average Americans don't feel the stock market – they care about their grocery bills.
- Trump runs the risk of alienating people by telling them that the economy is thriving when they aren't feeling it in their daily lives.
  - Look back ⏪: This is what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did – see how that turned out?
- ⬆️ Americans are paying record highs for ground beef, chickens are more expensive, and the cost of coffee has soared 33%.
- Cookout costs 🍔: This doesn't bode well for Trump when families are stocking up on those exact items for their Labor Day cookouts next weekend.
But 🚨: If the administration can pull off a cut to interest rates, investors could reshape the future of the American economy – and those cuts might just happen soon.
- 📰 "Powell suggests Fed could cut rates soon as Trump policies shake economy," our partners at The Hill write.
  - ✍️ "In the near term, risks to inflation are tilted to the upside, and risks to employment to the downside — a challenging situation. When our goals are in tension like this, our framework calls for us to balance both sides of our dual mandate," Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said earlier today.

Bolton Raid 🚔

Full disclosure 🚨: John Bolton is a friend of mine. For more than a decade, I have known him to be a man fully dedicated to advancing American interests.

Irony: Trump has now made him a hero of the Left.

Breaking 📰: "FBI Raids Home, Office of Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton," headlines The Wall Street Journal.

✍️ "The FBI on Friday searched the Maryland home and downtown D.C. office of former Trump national security adviser John Bolton … escalating a years-old probe into whether the prominent Trump critic mishandled classified information."
- 📸 Click here to see FBI agents carry boxes into Bolton's home.
Be fair ⚖️: We will look at this raid based on the facts and the law.
President Donald Trump was asked by reporters about the raid, saying that he found out about the raid as it was happening on television:
- 🎤 "I have not spoken to Pam [Bondi] and the group yet, but I will be. I saw it just like everybody else. I try to stay out of that stuff. I am allowed to be – and I'm chief law enforcement officer, believe it or not. I know that I like to go around saying that, but I am, this position. But I purposely don't want to get involved. I'm not a fan of John Bolton. I thought he was a sleazebag … I don't know anything about it," Trump said in the Oval Office.
🚔 The president referenced when the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago resort back in August of 2022:
- 🎤 "But my house was raided, also at Mar-a-Lago. They raided everything, including my young son's room and my wife's area, they went through her drawers, as the expression goes. They went through everything you could imagine. … So, you know, I know the feeling. It's not a good feeling."
  - Look back ⏪: Bolton previously commented on the Mar-a-Lago raid just weeks after it happened:
    - 🎤 "I don't think he cares about the classification system. I don't think he appreciated the sensitivity of this information. And he didn't appreciate the sensitivity of how it was often acquired – the so-called sources and methods," Bolton told MSNBC.
While Trump denied knowledge of the Bolton raid, Vice President JD Vance sounded quite knowledgeable about it during his interview with NBC News:
- 🎤 "We're in the very early stages of an ongoing investigation into John Bolton ... if we think Ambassador Bolton committed a crime, of course, eventually prosecutions will come ... there's a broad concern about Ambassador Bolton."
  - Note 📝: As Vance said, this is an ongoing investigation – we don't know if there is any evidence of a crime, nor the details of what that crime could be.

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